


Faith Healer

by justanothersong



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Castiel as God, Dean Winchester - Freeform, Gen, Godstiel - Freeform, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Hospital, Illness, Implied Castiel/Dean Winchester, One-Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-19 17:11:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3617724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In her last days, Layla Rourke gets a surprise visitor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faith Healer

She had stayed so much longer than she should have been able to, but then, Layla had always been a fighter. She’d hung on long past any estimate the doctors had been able to set; for years they kept giving her timelines, as though she had expiration date stamped somewhere that only they with their machines and x-rays could see, but she continued to defy the odds.

Perhaps she was just stubborn that way.

It was getting close now, though. She could feel it, the final weight of her own death settling into her bones. 

It had been years since her last real hope for a life beyond the walls of the hospitals and clinics that seemed to hold her captive had finally died away, in the form of miraculous healer losing his magic touch on the day he was set to give her back her health. Layla had accepted it then, letting the chips fall where they may and expecting no more reprieves from her death sentence.

Still, she had hung on, clinging to what little life she had left. There was no vain hope for survival, not anymore, just a simple will to stay a little longer, fight a little more, but even that was all over now.

 

Her mother was in the chapel again. Layla knew the woman wasn’t really praying; she left only to spare herself the pain of seeing her daughter, bone-thin and ill, perhaps hoping to spare herself the pain of watching the younger woman die.

Layla couldn’t blame her; all things considered, it was an event she would gladly miss herself. That thought made her laugh, cracked lips peeling back into the garish imitation of a smile, wheezed chuckles wracking her frame more like a hard cough than anything else.

There had been no removing the tumor; no neurosurgeon they had found would even attempt the surgery, saying that Layla would never make it off an operating table if they tried. Radiation wouldn’t shrink it, only made her constantly ill, vomiting on top of the migraines that plagued her, making what little time she had left almost unbearable. It had been her own decision to stop treatment, to let herself go quietly, but the tumor wouldn’t let her.

Instead, she withered. It felt as though her body were contracting in upon itself, as the beast in her brain stole more and more of her blood supply and put pressure on her grey matter. Her faculties remained, though her eyesight had begun to dim in the last few days and it was difficult to speak or move her limbs. It was a slow, miserable death; the hospice nurses fed her morphine to stamp away the pain, but it was never really enough. Layla wanted to stay lucid as long as she could and refused their quiet suggestions to sleep through her final hours.

 

She could hear the ticking of the clock above her hospital bed and pulled in a rattling breath. Had she any real strength left, she would have startled when she saw the man suddenly standing there beside her, looking far too serene and almost otherworldly.

It was funny; he seemed almost common place. An average man in an average suit and coat, who perhaps had gotten turned around in the sweeping halls of the hospice when searching for his own loved one among the wasteland of sick and dying. Layla very nearly asked if he was lost, but there was something different about him that stilled her tongue.

She thought perhaps it was the eyes. Blue, and beautiful, more than any man had right to be, but it wasn’t just that. There was knowledge there, a glimpse of the infinite hidden among lively shades of sapphire, something sacred that made her keep quiet.

“Layla Rourke,” he said, reaching out a hand to rest against her head, brushing the last few strands of her cornsilk hair away from her face. “I’ve come to end your suffering.”

For one wild, terrified moment, Layla thought she was dying. She felt sudden blazing warmth that began at the top of her head and then began to cool, trickling down her spine and spreading through her, from the tips of her fingers to the tips of her toes and back again. She pulled in a deep breath in surprise, startled by the feel of her lungs expanding and contracting, wide and open and free in a way that hadn’t in many days. 

The dimness in her eyes and the numbness in her body faded away, and Layla suddenly felt whole and good for the first time in longer than she could remember. She raised her hands to her face and felt a fullness in her cheeks that had long since left her, felt the throb of her pulse in her veins and the blessed absence of any pain or fear.

“I don’t understand,” she spoke, voice soft and whisper quiet but not trembling and cracking as it had been.

The strange man smiled. “You are healed,” he said simply, the gravelly timbre of his voice reaching down to her very bones. 

“But why?” Layla asked. She accepted his words as truth; the brilliance she had sensed in him when he appeared told her that he did not lie, that by heavenly power he had stripped away all that ailed her and made her whole again. “Why me? Why now?”

“You are good, and kind,” he said. “You made a lasting impression on the Righteous Man. He thought of you often, though he did not speak of it. You are healed, because he wills it so.”

He was gone suddenly, before Layla could even blink, and she startled even herself when she sat up easily in her bed, feeling the weight of new muscle in her legs and the heaviness of her hair, no longer lank and thin, against her neck. She was still staring in wonder and the soft unblemished skin of her hands when her mother returned from the chapel, only to scream and faint to the floor.

The nurses could only stare in wonder when they approached, expecting to find the kind and softspoken woman having quietly passed on, only to find her crouched at her mother’s side, smiling softly and asking for water to wake her.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know. Don't ask.
> 
> Follow me on [Tumblr](http://literatec.tumblr.com), if you wish.
> 
> Please do not add this, or any of my posted works, to Goodreads. Thank you.


End file.
